Let me start by saying, I really really really like Fireowrks for web visuals preperation works. It just does 95% of what I want to do in the way I want to work.

I've search the web far and wide and found quite a few people asking similar questions, worryingly spanning many versions of Fireworks, but I still havn't found any sort of comprehensive answer

I'm running a macbook pro

OSX 10.7.3

i7

8gb Ram

Fireworks CS5.1

Plenty of space on my hard drive.

Levels of undo set to 10 (ten)

The symptoms seem already well documented elsewhere and mine seem no different.

I create a file in Fireworks (approx 1100 x 2000px) create a website screen mockup, and then perhaps duplicate the framework to several more pages within the file and editing them to show different website pages. There is another issue that at some point Fireworks WILL crash, so I've got a long standing habit of saving very regularly (to the point of being OCD about it) I can live with that issue but the problem is that saving very soon becomes very slow to save.

I can open up my file (34mb in totoal, 8 pages) from a fresh reboot, no other apps running and move one item 1 px and hit save and firework can take 13 seconds to save the file. As I'm saving because of the crashing issue, every couple of minutes, this 13 seconds is quite a big percentage of my time.

If I "save as" and then restart everything from scratch (mac and app) and open the new file and do the same test its still 13 secs to do a save. If I delete 7 of the 8 pages and then "save as" again, the save time does drop to 5 seconds.

Is this normal? I handle much much bigger files in different apps, such as photoshop, without this sort of problem.

I've now upgraded my MBP to a SSD drive and the machine in general flies (opening Aperture down from 26 secs to just 3 secs) and I've installed the trial of Fireworks CS6.

BUT...

The problem is still there. Take a 36mb file using no symbols, move an item hit save and it still taking 10-12 seconds. So there its nothing to do hardware - Its a real shame as Fireworks is close to be the ideal product but this major flaw makes it almost unusable in busy day to day environment